Hockey is a high paced, physically demanding sport that requires high levels of skill and endurance from the players. To stay on top of their game, hockey players are in need of reliable high performance equipment that enhances their game skills. As hockey sticks are used to pass the puck to other players and to shoot at the opposing team's net to score goals, they are considered as key pieces of equipment of any ice hockey players. The stick is often considered as an extension of the player's arm and any slight improvement in the stick's maneuverability, responsiveness and performance can have a significant impact on a player's game.
There are several different kinds of shots that a player can take with his stick including shovel shots, wrist shots, snap shots, slapshots, backhand shots and one timers. These different types of shots require the player to carry out different motions with his stick and players can take advantage of different characteristics of their sticks when performing many of these shots.
Today's conventional hockey sticks have a shaft and an adjoining blade. The shaft has a handle (being the portion that a typical player grasps during most of the course of normal use of the stick during game play) and a shank (being the portion extending below the handle to the connection point with the neck of the blade). The blade has a body having a striking surface and a neck extending upwards from the body that connects to the shank of the shaft.
The materials used to make hockey sticks have changed over the course of time. Hockey sticks have been made having shafts of solid wood, laminated wood, fiberglass-reinforced-polymer-coated wood, fiberglass-reinforced polymers, aluminum, or more recently, carbon-fiber-reinforced polymers. Similarly, hockey stick blades have been commonly made of different materials such as wood or carbon-fiber-reinforced polymers. Nowadays, hockey sticks are often one piece sticks having both a shaft and a blade made of a fiber-reinforced polymer, the shaft typically being hollow.
Two of the key characteristics of hockey sticks frequently referred to when it comes to improving a player's game are flexibility and the position of the kick point. The flexibility of an ice hockey stick refers to its capacity to bend when pressure is applied to it, such as while the player is performing the motion required for a particular shot and to get back to its initial shape. When it conies to flexibility, the stick is seen as a spring load capturing a portion of the energy generated by the player when performing his shooting motion, and releasing it toward the end of the player's motion to push to puck forward, thereby improving power and/or speed of the shot. The kick point is the portion of the ice hockey stick that flexes when pressure is applied to it. Some players prefer a hockey stick with a lower kick point. Further to past improvements in hockey stick design, a need has developed for hockey sticks providing always better performance allowing players to enhance their game.